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The stereotypical HN reader (age 20-40 tech professional) should have three to six months of salary in cash (interest-bearing savings/checking/money market acco
by ThrustVectoring 7y ago
The stereotypical HN reader (age 20-40 tech professional) should have three to six months of salary in cash (interest-bearing savings/checking/money market account), rest in low-cost equity index funds (I use 60% VTI / 40% VXUS).
Gold is, IMO, a disaster preparedness thing you buy after purchasing a shotgun, ammunition, and a month's worth of canned food. The main use case for gold is as highly portable physical wealth - in highly messed-up situations, you retain at lease some ability to engage in limited amounts of commerce to get yourself to a more stable situation.
- ant6n 7y agoThat's an interesting implied point. Does it make sense to hold gold on paper, if it's mostly useful in highly messed up situations where paper gold would become worthless?
- ThrustVectoring 7y agoYeah, I wouldn't do that. Security costs for physical gold are already low if you have a way to securely store a shotgun, most of what you're dealing with is a wider buy/sell spread, which is pretty small overall. The problem with "paper gold" of various sorts is that it usually winds up being a promise to give you a certain number of dollars based on the spot price of gold. This is a problem if dollars stop being of practical use. There's still a hell of a lot of things that are better to do before buying physical gold here, of course. Bigger risk-mitigation moves are like, minor emergency preparedness, own-occupation disability insurance, term life insurance, and dumping a ton of money into the stock market for getting enough long-term price appreciation.